May 29, 2007

Vista and Gaming

- Microsoft has, effectively, helped me pay the mortgage for a few years now. I just plain LOVE a number of their products. And for a long, long, long time I've been a major fan boi.

- Vista Ruined all of that. And made me seriously question whether the entire company had lost its mind.

- Happily, the dev tools folks and server OS folks haven't lost it. Longhorn/Server 2008 is just damned awesome (I can't believe how nicely it has turned out - especially for IIS and application/web servers). And Visual Studio Orcas is looking like a killer release - along with LINQ and C# 3.0 (I can't wait to start using them in production.) And Silverlight, while the name is dumb, represents true innovation. Then there's also SQL Server Katmai. These things let me hold my head high.

- But Vista just won't stop pissing me off. It's like the 'gift' that keeps on taking.

Case in point, MS' recent announcement of how they anticipate getting gamers to 'adopt':

In an attempt to boost popularity of its new operating system among gamers and a new application programming interface (API) among game developers, Microsoft Corp. plans to make DirectX 10-compliant graphics cores compulsory for personal computers carrying “Windows Vista Premium” logotype in mid-2008. [Xbitlabs.com]

Uh guys? DX10 is a killer move. As a gamer it looks dreamy and I can't wait. But no way in hell I'm running any game I own on Vista. Period.

If MS wants me to adopt Vista, maybe they should just fix the damn thing and make it so that gamers actually would like to use it - rather than trying to threaten/entice people with stickers/logos. Only, I'm convinced that it's enough of a train-wreck at this point that they can't do that.

Seriously, Hanselman is a very up-beat and optimistic lad who takes a pretty level-headed approach to problems and things in general. But when he's having MAJOR performance problems on all 4 of his Vista machines (caused by a number of problems) and doesn't see any relief in site, then it's time to admit that Vista is just plain BUSTED. If you haven't read his post yet, go read it. You'll see that he was WAY TOO NICE, and Vista is seriously busted. Hell, it can't even IDLE correctly. How are we supposed to play system-intensive games on it?

"Sorry dude, you'll have to play without me today, Vista wants to check some files for indexing purposes... " won't get you far with your gaming friends.

Remember when Windows XP came out? Gamers and game developers couldn't WAIT to jump ship to XP. $10 says that in 2 years game makers will STILL be supporting XP.

Me? I just bought an insanely sweet gaming rig. (More on that later.) I'm pretty sure I'll install Ubuntu on it before I install Vista. At least with Ubuntu I'll feel like I'm venturing into new territory with all of my headaches and the forced 'learning curve'. Vista is just a bunch of headaches to get things to work that I've come to rely upon.

And seriously, if I'm laying out $600 on Video Cards alone, anyone want to explain to me why I'd want my hardware being sloppily abused by my underlying OS? It's not like I'm going to get ANY benefit from doing so - and DX10 will run on XP.

Comments

can't say i agree. installed vista on a single machine back in november and after some weeks swithed all other machines to vista too. haven't had a single problem with any of those machines, and i certainly won't go back to xp.

I have to disagree as well. You might want to try sticking with it for a little while. I find that Vista performs _differently_ than XP. It takes my machine a while to start up and it is slow for the first couple minutes in the morning while it does various scheduled tasks and such, but after that it performs really well.

I've just completed a project assessing workstation performance for a financial services company and Vista came through with flying colors.

I too see that my Vista machine never really idles at 0% cpu, but that doesn't mean it isn't just as fast when I need it to be fast.

I'm talking about gaming. And specifically about what having a rogue process start up during gaming would do for 'performance'.

That said, on a whim, I went and did a bit of googling and found the following, excellent, review of XP vs Vista performance:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/index.html

It actually looks, based on that article, that the perf hit for Vista isn't that big of a deal - though there's no counting for rogue processes here and there. And I've also seen it be a total, complete, piece of crap when it comes to running VPCs that have NO problem running in XP.